Posts Tagged With: words

Yep, yep – the posts are few and far between, and super short when I even manage to get around to it. What a sad turn of events for the 1 year anniversary of starting this whole thing. I had really hoped to keep up with it better… then life kept happening.

But we are still here, I am trying to remember to post when funny things happen, and at this point I will take getting something up once a month as a huge accomplishment!

And when tibits like this come out of Soapfi’s mouth it makes it a wee bit easier to do.

Today we went to visit grandma, there are a lot of turns around corners as we wind our way up to her house. We were just going around the last one when Soapfi exclaimed:

“We need to turn more corners!!!”

When I asked why she replied:

“So we can finish our corn field!”

I’m still not sure if she was trying to be funny or if she really thinks that turning corners is where corn comes from!

So it’s been a long time since the last post. Between holidays and other things I just wasn’t inspired to write a damn thing.

A New Year’s Resolution to get back to blogging was made and broken within about 48 hours.

And then potty training started happening, and early on I promised not to go into excruciating TMI about *that* whole ordeal and all the bodily functions associated with it. We are still in the midst of the “Battle for Dry Undies”, and for the most part I won’t go into it much.

But Soapfi did say something too funny the other day to not share… even though it probably doesn’t even flirt with the TMI line but stomps the hell all over it.

So poor Soapfi has been having chronic problems with ear infections (we head to the ENT next week to discuss the possibility/necessity of tubes in her ears), which means she is on Penicillin a lot, which leads to a pH imbalance, which leads to the dreaded yeast beast, which as anyone who has had that particular infection knows – urinating is damn uncomfortable and can sting like the dickens.

At this point we’re just trying to get Soapfi to start telling us she *needs* to use the potty as opposed to just informing us the event has transpired (so far we’re striking out in that department) but the other day we made a slight improvement – she at least told us *while* it was happening by shouting across the room:

Soapfi knows a lot of words, 90% of them I can understand, 5% I can eventually decipher, and the rest I assume are a foreign language known only to two year olds.

One of the words that took me a while to decipher the first, second, and even third time I heard it was “bob-cycle”. (Even now I *still* have to think about it!) Because the usage was “I want a bob-cycle”.

Naturally I first went to bicycle – nope. Then I was stumped.

Did she want one of those old school ski bobs? It’s not even winter, how could she even know what those were? Has she been watching old Warren Miller films on the internet? Was she wanting a bobcat riding a tricycle? Who knows what kind of crazy kids books she’s seeing at playschool – I am so out of my league!

Poor mommy kept saying “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you” and poor Soapfi kept asking for a “bob-cycle”. After a good five minutes she finally gave up and said “I want ice cream”…. and that’s when it hit me….

Yesterday was practically Christmas in April. My Grinch heart grew three sizes and bloop, bloop, blooped it’s way to moosh. Soapfi has always been an affectionate kidlet, she adores the giving and receiving of hugs and kisses, and wants nothing more than to sit in your lap and cuddle. We know she loves us, because her face lights up, she squeals in delight, and runs full tilt into our legs when we pick her up from playschool. She wants nothing more than to just be around us, and since actions speak louder than words, we though we were content with how she expressed her love.

And then last night happened – for the first time ever Soapfi plopped herself into my lap, gave me a hug, and said clear as a bell “I love you Mommy”. Then she jumped down ran over and climbed into Daddy’s lap, gave him a hug, and said “I love you Daddy”.

Actions are good, but those words made every other crazy ass thing going on in our lives seem small and insignificant. Then Mommy and Daddy simply turned into a puddle of mush and caved in when she asked for chocolate later that night, most likely her long term plan the entire time!

There are many days where I just wonder what the hell is going on in that little brain of hers. I don’t know if I would be fascinated, or scared, at her thought process. She retains a lot of information, so much so that most of the time *we* have forgotten that she has seen or heard something before, so to us it’s like she’s magically pulling information out of the ether.

There are select things that she has retained from babyhood. She will still sign “please” (even if she is saying it out loud) when she wants something from us. But, she never signs please when she is using it in place of thank you – if you ask her if she would like something that she doesn’t really want, she will answer you “No, please”. As opposed to “No like…”, which is reserved for when you are struggling in vain to put her into a coat, pajamas, car seat or any other modern day baby torture device. That turns into a litany of “No like a coat”, “No like go bed”, “No like a cheese” (which is a flat out lie, she loves cheese!). So the girl has definitely proven her grasp of situation appropriate verbiage.

There are other things she must have glommed onto in babyhood that no matter how often we correct her, she refuses to let go of what she has established as her own personal truth. For example, Soapfi would correctly identify this as a castle:

There is much cheering from the crowd, way to go Soapfi. Well it’s only dumb luck that she identified it correctly, because in Soapfi’s world, this is a castle:

Some how in her mind, flags are castles. Took us a while to figure that one out, since most of the time she was seeing flags when we were around to hear her talk about them, they were on top of sand castles or old brick buildings that could look like castles. The neighbor put out his Dale Earnhardt racing flag a while back and Soapfi kept shouting “castle, castle, castle” every time she’d peek out the window, but just beyond the neighbors house is a huge old brick apartment building that could look like a castle, so we didn’t make the connection. Then she received a Noah’s Ark Little People set that comes with a flag for the top of the boat. The flag eventually jiggled loose and fell off the boat and Soapfi kept asking where the castle was, mommy is of course completely clueless because Soapfi doesn’t have any play castles. She finally finds it with a “Oh, here it is” plops it back on top of the boat and mommy clues in. We have been correcting her ever since, but a castle, is a castle, is a castle.

The other item she has given a unique name to is the Space Needle, and in this case I have no desire to correct her, because it’s the cutest thing ever! According to Soapfi, it is “The Big”. And well, the girl’s not wrong. That started a few months ago after we had gone to the Seattle Center for a birthday party at the Children’s Museum. As we were walking back to the car from the Center House you could look up and see the Space Needle, being a child of the 70’s I started telling her about the Wheedle on the Needle (she was not impressed), and making various comments about it being so big, etc., etc. Well it stuck. Now if a commercial comes on with the Space Needle (and actually the Eiffel Tower as well), she joyously shouts “The Big”, “The Big”.

The almighty “everyone” strikes again, everyone says to enjoy it while it lasts, they are only young once, blah blah blah. I am enjoying things, amazed at how much she is growing and changing day by day, and still impatient for her to reach certain ages and milestones, because I perceive them to be times when we’ll have even more fun.

I can’t *wait* until she can do more with yarn than just wrap herself up in it and run around. I hope that she will take interest in all that crafty stuff that I love – I want to take her to Michaels when she truly comprehends the *FUN* of all the available “stuff” and what we could make together. Right now it mostly involves her being impatient with having to stay in the cart, because she certainly gets the “oh, shiny” aspect of being in there and won’t hesitate to grab any and everything! (We came home with one stem of fake roses (bent beyond repair) and one box of crayons (tips all broken off because she dropped them) in addition to the planned St. Paddy’s Day related purchases, all because I couldn’t mitigate the rapid destruction of said items when the cart drifted a wee bit too close to the shelves. I am a firm believer in “you break it, you buy it” because it’s just *NOT COOL* to pretend your child’s swath of destruction did not happen.)

I look forward to the day when we can sit down and truly read a story together. She loves books, loves identifying things in pictures, but what she loves most is turning the pages…. rapidly!! I love reading and I’m a completest, nothing frustrates me more than trying to read The Hungry Little Caterpillar and skipping all the fun counting/eating bits in the middle even if I know it all by heart and have already “read” it a dozen times that day.

All that being said about my rush towards her future, there are things that I’m starting to miss. One of those happened last night when I realized how *complete* her sentences have become. Granted it’s still “I do it.” and “I no like it.” She hasn’t mastered contractions or all her verb tenses yet, but she is beginning to fill out her sentences with “a” and “the”, and starting to pronounce things better. Last night at dinner she declared to the world that “I like the milk.” Even though “I like milk.” is a perfectly appropriate sentence, to me, putting in the “the” made it seem so much more grown up.

The one that got me the most though, was realizing that she was now properly saying “Peek A Boo” when we were playing. I admit it, I miss “Peek Boo”.

Every day Soapfi get’s more and more personality. It’s amusing to watch, that is part of the reason we haven’t taken her out and left her in the woods during the rough times, because we just know something cute or funny is eventually going to happen in her brain and come right out of her mouth.

Her newest thing is affirmation, with complete conviction. It usually goes something like this:

Soapfi: “Dog”

Mommy: “A brown dog”

Soapfi: “Dog. That’s right!”

It usually happens after we’ve expounded on something she’s identified, or sometimes if we correct her. It’s even starting to happen if we identify something first.

Mommy: “Oh look Soapfi, a truck.”

Soapfi: “Truck. That’s right!”

The best part is the way she says it. With complete conviction in her declaration and that her proclamation is now law.

Soapfi likes knowing the names of things, sometimes to an alarming degree of specificity. She is delighted to point and call out “truck, car, bus, bike, moto (motorcycle)” whenever appropriate. She is learning her musical instruments and is starting to differentiate between a saxophone and a trumpet, a guitar and a violin. She most definitely knows the difference between a live chicken and a live duck, and will cluck or quack appropriately.

I say live, because once an animal becomes food, in Soapfi’s world, it’s all chicken.

We sat down to dinner last night, a wonderful platter of short ribs and some noodles with veggies. The exchange when something like this:

Soapfi: “Chicken!” (Mommy mistakenly thinks she is asking for something else for dinner.)

Mommy: “We aren’t having chicken. You can have some of these short ribs.”

Soapfi: “No, Mommy.” (Mommy mistakenly thinks she is saying no to the short ribs.)

Mommy: “Would you like the noodles then?”

Soapfi: “CHICKEN!” (Accompanied by a lunge and a death grip on a piece of short rib.)

Small interlude while Mommy extracts short rib, cuts it into Soapfi friendly pieces and removes the bones, and returns the rib meat. The soundtrack to this interlude would be Soapfi crying “more chicken” and sniffling when she wasn’t allowed to play with the knife.

Mommy: “This isn’t chicken, it’s beef.”

Soapfi: (With obvious exasperation) “No, Mommy, chicken.”

No wonder she has been so good about trying new things, she thinks it is chicken. I plan to take full advantage of this for as long as possible.